The development of modern communications technologies has enabled people to communicate by more and richer mechanisms—via e-mail, text messaging, video conferencing, posting content to web pages, microblogging, and other such expanding mechanisms. This increase in communication mechanisms, however, brings about a concomitant increase in the complexity of determining someone's contact information. For example, a particular internet user may have a home telephone number, a cellular telephone number, a work telephone number, a work e-mail address, a personal e-mail address, a home page, a blog, an IM account, and other such mechanisms for communicating with others. This multitude of connection mechanisms can make it difficult to keep track of contact information for a number of friends or acquaintances. Also, it can be hard to get and enter all such information from a new acquaintance. That is why, frequently, people tell a new acquaintance to call their telephone number or e-mail them, so that they can capture, respectively, the other user's telephone number or e-mail address.
Such difficulties become even more pronounced across a user's lifetime as they move from situation to situation. For example, each time a user changes jobs, they generally lose their old work telephone number and e-mail address and acquire new ones. This may result in a business social networking site “pinging” all of their acquaintances to announce that the acquaintances should check for the new contact information. It may also result in acquaintances who are not updated in such a manner getting a wrong number or an e-mail bounce-back when they try to reach an old acquaintance.